Play-Doh is such a versatile, sensory material for children and there are so many different ways that your children can play and learn with it.

I love to create invitations to play for my children where I set out a selected variety of materials and encourage them to combine them in different ways. Often the play is very open ended with no preconceived ideas in place, and sometimes, like with this activity, we have a certain direction of play. Whatever the outcome required, Play-Doh is a wonderful base material for practicing a range of different skills, especially basic kitchen skills.

Materials

The play

To set up your pretend pizza shop, start by making a few quick signs to set the scene. Depending on their capabilities, your children can do this themselves or you can help them along.

Together with your child, brainstorm the different pizza toppings you could create using your Play-Doh and make a list. This will get them thinking about different foods and colours and also how they are going to prepare them.

Having the signs also helps your child develop their early literacy skills by reinforcing key words and exposing them to opportunities to read and decipher words that have current meaning to them. Add little drawings for visual help to connect the words with the objects.

Set up a little “shop” area with a table, your Play-Doh, your preparatory materials and little bowls to put the ingredients in.

Time to prepare all the pizza toppings. Kitchen skills include learning to use a grater (supervise little fingers carefully), using a knife to cut Play-Doh into varying thickness, manipulating a rolling pin to flatten evenly and applying even pressure to roll out little balls.

Once Maddie’s ingredients were all prepared, she was ready to create!

Using the menu as a guide, she delighted in taking orders to make special, one-of-a-kind pizzas. This provided great opportunities to work the brain and practice memory skills.

Each pizza became a work of art as she used the paper plates as pizza bases and added the pizza toppings as requested.

Alternative: If you have plenty of play-doh, you could roll out larger balls and use it for the pizza base as well. The good thing about using the plates meant that when it came time to pack up, it was quite easy to separate the colours back out, which would be more difficult if they were also stuck on a Play-Doh base.

To make the plates look even more realistic as pizza bases, you could add some red paint on them first for a tomato sauce base.

She was busy creating “pizza art,” as she called it, (a very specialty pizza shop indeed!) for ages.